A good judge of character(s)

A possible topic that I’d noted for later use here is ‘favourite mistranscriptions’. A combination of old style handwriting, splodgy ink, poor digital images and often a limited understanding on the part of the transcriber of what is being transcribed can create some amusing, or annoying, renderings of the official records. So far I’ve failed to make a record of these, but I almost created one of my own today which would have counted.

What would you reckon the letters in this image are: ?

It’s not quite the one I stumbled over, but I’m fairly sure its by the same hand. The image is the first 2 characters of ‘Kate’. My earlier encounter I had originally transcribed, reluctantly, as a surname of ‘Thing’! Further instances of this form made me realise it wasn’t Th, but K, making this person a less amusing ‘King’.

Here’s a few more potential puzzlers, two different hands mind. All from the London School Admissions keying image sets in the Ancestry World Archives Project (WAP), which I’m contributing to a little.

– uppercase T – St, as in abbreviation for Street

– uppercase F – uppercase H

– uppercase B

– uppercase E

Oh, and by the way, on WAP currently two people key each image set independently with someone else verifying any discrepancies. So hopefully my ‘Thing’ would have been caught and corrected even if I had failed to do so. Ancestry is however changing the process for new keying projects.

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